SOCIAL 4 Flashcards
Social group
A collection of individuals who interact with one another and share
similar goals and a sense of unity.
“Canadian citizens, UBC students”
What forms a social group?
- Set of privileges/benefits that only members of the group get to enjoy
- Costs/ requirements: pay taxes, follow Canadian law
What counts as a potential group?
If you notice a similarity between yourself and another person in some trait, you can assume that are likely to work together for mutual benefit.
Categories of groups
- Ingroup: the group of people that we believe are in our group because they share some trait
- Outgroup: the group of people that cannot be in our group because they do not have the requisite trait
What is outgroup negativity?
- Possessing more negative traits (they are dumber, lazier, etc)
- More homogeneous than the in-group (“all of them are the same”)
- Acting badly for dispositional reasons, while in-group for situational.
Social Facilitation
Situations in which groups of people perform better
together than any single individual within the group would perform on their
own.
Forms in which social facilitation
- Combine effort to do more than any single person can
- Divide labor so that each person can become specialized
- Pass knowledge to each other over time.
When is social facilitation most likely?
When the group task is: Well-defined, not highly effortful, when credit and blame can be appropriately assigned, Group size is not very large.
When do groups do worse together?
- Diffusion of responsibility: In large groups, some people can do less and still gain the benefits.
- Group-think: Consensus can be more important than being right.
- Conformity and deindividuation: If somebody is different from the rest, it could endanger the entire group.
- Reduced cooperation with other groups: Prone to prejudice, discrimination, aggression toward other groups.
Diffusion of responsibility
The tendency for individuals to feel diminished responsibility for their actions when they are surrounded by others or belong to a large group, thereby resulting in a group paradoxically doing
less than any individual would on their own.
Paradox of groups
When faces with any difficult situation or action, a group can pool more resource to do more work but fail to do this.
Types of diffusion of responsibility
Social loafing and bystander effect.
Social loafing
The tendency for people to expend less effort in a group than alone.
Likely when there is no way to catch the amount of effort.
Bystander effect
a phenomenon where individuals fail to help a victim when others are around; the more people are around, the less likely people are to themselves help
Groupthink
A phenomenon where groups reach consensus on a decision not because the decision is correct or best, but because it maintains consensus in a group.
Symptoms of groupthink
Censorship
Illusion of agreement
Out-group negativity
The illusion of invulnerability
Group polarization
the tendency for groups to make decisions that are more extreme or polarizing than any single member would have done on their own.
If you hang out around people with extreme opinion, you are more likely to become extreme yourself
Deindividualization
A phenomenon where individuals become less aware and concerned with their individual values and instead become more aware and
concerned with the group’s values.
Riot Contagion
A phenomena whereby people observing others rioting are significantly more likely to then riot themselves.
Zimbardo and Milgram
groups can inhibit their own moral standards and do something terrible in the name of the group’s desires
Conformity works through a variety of mechanisms:
- Deindividualization: If people’s sense of self is diminished in a group, they are more
likely to act in accordance with group behavior even when it conflicts their own - Pressure to prove ingroup status: if the group’s behavior is a kind of marker of what this group does, many people don’t want to stand out from the group in order to convince others that they belong
Asch Conformity Experiment
An extremely influential experiment demonstrating how easy is to conform, which line is longer in a group setting.
70% participants went and chose the wrong line.
Benefits of groups
Increase our chance of survival, specialization, etc.
Costs of groups are high and unavoidable
- Diffuse responsibility: less efficient at dealing with problems compared to individuals.
- Make decisions to maintain harmony.
- Suppress individual differences, resulting in deindividuation and conformity.
- Groups tend to discriminate other groups.
